AMERICA'S DISASTROUS WITHDRAWAL FROM CENTRAL ASIA
In the interim, we’ve learned the extent to which President Biden overruled his military commanders who hoped to see an enduring American footprint in the country. Or, at the very least, preserve the U.S. presence at Bagram Airbase in anticipation of the need to exfiltrate large numbers of U.S. service personnel, U.S. citizens, and America’s Afghan allies. We’ve learned that the administration’s laughably static estimates that roughly 100 or so Americans were left behind when Americans fled the country was a flat-out lie. Approximately 10,000–15,000 Americans were in Afghanistan when Kabul fell to the Taliban, and only 6,000 of those Americans were evacuated along with the U.S. military presence. The rest were left behind, relying primarily on civilian efforts to exfiltrate them from behind enemy lines. Contrary to the administration and its defenders, we learned that none of this came as a surprise. Or at least it shouldn’t have, given a July 2021 U.S. intelligence estimate predicting that, “should the Taliban seize cities, a cascading collapse could happen rapidly, and the Afghan security forces were at high risk of falling apart,” according to the New York Times. We learned that President Biden’s commitment to the “basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls,” which would manifest in the administration’s effort to “speak out for women and girls all around the world,” was nonsense. The Taliban’s assurances that women and girls could continue to access education under their restored rule was a ruse. Afghan women are once again relegated to second-class-citizen status. And while women and children starve, Sopko informed U.S. lawmakers that the Taliban’s fighters “seem to be fat, dumb, and happy.”
“The Taliban has committed to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base for external operations that could threaten the United States or our allies, including Al Qaeda and ISIS-K,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured lawmakers in 2021. Not so, according to the United Nations Security Council, which alleged last year that terrorist front groups such as Jaish-i-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba are operating training camps and producing narcotics for export inside Afghanistan. Tajikistan, one of Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors, appears increasingly unnerved by the presence of radical Islamist militants in Afghanistan, including groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group with close links to al-Qaeda. And now we learn from the U.S. inspector general that American aid dollars may be helping to fund the Taliban’s program of human-rights abuses and the reconstitution of terrorist organizations with the goal of exporting extremist militarism abroad.
